Zechariah1chapter 1

Zechariah 1:1-6

In the eighth month: The date fixes the moment precisely: the eighth month of Darius's second year, roughly October 520 BC, two months after Haggai's first oracle and while the temple foundation still lay stalled. Zechariah's opening word is not a vision but a plain summons to repentance, framed as a two-way turning, Turn ye unto me... and I will turn unto you, the covenant relationship restored from the human side first. The fathers who ignored the former prophets are held up as a warning, and the returned exiles themselves are made to confess the point: Like as the Lord of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, so hath he dealt with us, the exile itself standing as proof that the prophetic word does not fail.

Zechariah 1:7-13

Three months later, on the twenty-fourth of Shebat, the first of eight night visions opens: a rider on a red horse among the myrtle trees in a ravine, with red, speckled and white horses behind him, patrol-angels who have walked to and fro through the earth and report that all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest. The report is the vision's irony, the Persian world at ease while Jerusalem and the cities of Judah lie under the Lord's own indignation these threescore and ten years, the seventy years of Jeremiah's prophecy apparently expired without the promised restoration arriving in full. The angel of the Lord himself intercedes, how long wilt thou not have mercy, and the Lord answers with good words and comfortable words, the vision's crisis resolved before it is explained to the prophet.

Zechariah 1:14-17

The comfortable words are given content: the Lord is jealous for Jerusalem and Zion with a great jealousy, and sore displeased with the nations that are at ease, the very powers used to punish Judah now judged for exceeding their commission, for I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction. Calvin and the older bench read this as the standing principle behind every instrument God raises against his people, the rod is used and then broken for using too much force. The promise answers the vision's report point for point: my house shall be built in it, a line shall be stretched forth upon Jerusalem, anticipating the measuring vision of chapter two, and my cities through prosperity shall yet be spread abroad, the Lord comforting Zion and choosing Jerusalem again.

Zechariah 1:18-21

The second vision answers the first with a change of image: four horns, the power to gore and scatter, which have scattered Judah, Israel and Jerusalem so that no man did lift up his head. The bench names the readings on which four are meant, some hearing the four world powers later named in Daniel, others the regional enemies nearer Zechariah's own day, and settles on no single identification. Against the horns the Lord shows four carpenters, or smiths, raised up to fray them, to cast out the horns of the Gentiles, a craftsman's tool matched to every weapon lifted against Zion, so that no power that scatters outlasts the hand that answers it.